How Ya Doin In Yahoo?
Word is out - Yahoo is Updating … and changes will continue over the next week or two.
I *love* Yahoo. It has treated me well and has continued to do so this go around.
One thing I’ll be watching is a new-ish site of mine that’s been doing well in MSN, yet hasn’t hit top 10 in Yahoo *til this update*. Sweeet!
Why am I watching this site in particular? The current traffic I’m getting from MSN is just not converting into sales for me. Either my very targeted traffic (think *wood widgets*) is just ‘too loose’ and the search term is not a ‘buyer’s phrase but a browser’s phrase’, or the merchants suck at converting sales :lol:, or there are problems with tracking (toll free numbers *everywhere*), infected with you-know-what, yada yada yada, or could just be a loser thang to try selling online. Who knows.
I do know that I’m sending a lot of visitors and a lot of clicks to these merchants - and then losing them.
I aint in the free traffic biz.
So this month I’ll watch Yahoo traffic and see what happens. If the sales don’t start a-popping after a month (gotta give it a chance right?), I may just flip the site to adsense.
Yech.
Another site of mine (same age range), just popped into top ten for several terms. Gotta love that! Site does better than the one above, but it is a tad seasonal and I’m not sure if I missed that season. We’ll find out. 
Plus I nailed a few *very good* #1 terms across a couple sites.
Yahoooo!
One thing iffy is that hobby site of mine I’ve been chattering about. Not too sure where it’s fitting in Yahoo, I mixed the site up a bit and seem to have lost a few ‘non performing’ terms. No big loss, but it was bringing me eyeballs. May have been picked up in other areas - we’ll see.
Jon M:
July 20th, 2005 at 3:57 pm
I do well periodically in Yahoo. My homepage will be #3 or 4 for a few weeks then drop down to the hundred, only to come back to 3 or 4 a week or two later.
Are most of your sites focused on search engine traffic or do you do ppc too?
Terry:
July 20th, 2005 at 4:45 pm
Hi Jon, I do some ppc regularly - but not near as much as the big boys do. Pretty low key and I work with a small monthly budget. I find PPC and affiliate marketing can be so volatile. Network tracking is down, network is slow loading that day, etc. Sometimes I do well with ppc, other times not. Sometimes the sales aren’t there ‘just because’.
If I had my own product(s) and not an affiliate - I’d definitely be more deeply involved with PPC. Then I’d know that it really is a buggy sales day and not a buggy merchant tracking prob (who wants to pay ppc $ for that?). Successful PPC is a true science IMO, one that I don’t have enough discipline for.
I do depend on search engine traffic, bookmark traffic (is there such a thing? :lol:), word of mouth, etc. The word of mouth stuff doesn’t really happen with my aff sites though, more for the content sites.
I’m nowhere in Google for much of anything, but the other two engines (Yahoo and MSN) can provide action. To make money online, one really doesn’t need 10k hits a day from goog. It isn’t big money, but smaller traffic levels spread across several sites is easier on the nerves I think. To get a true idea though, I should really know what it’s like to work with a site getting 10k visitors/day ;).
I’ve really been thinking about this a lot lately and realized that I let myself get carried away with ‘building and creating and running in circles’, but don’t spend near enough time building long term traffic.
No targeted traffic = No money
I’ve really got to smarten up. I bought a bunch of guerrilla marketing books a bit ago, I need to sit down and read them. Get some ‘out of the box’ ideas on driving traffic. I just can’t figure out how to create some ‘buzz’ for an aff niche site selling blue plastic widgets, or whatever, you know?